Politecnico di Torino | Servizi per la didattica

KEYWORD

Secure Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications in Industry 4.0

keywords DIGITAL SYSTEM DESIGN, EMBEDDED SOFTWARE, EMBEDDED SYSTEMS, HARDWARE SECURITY, INDUSTRY 4.0, INTERNET-OF-THINGS, OPEN-SOURCE, OPERATING SYSTEMS, SECURE DATA MANAGEMENT, SECURITY, SYSTEM LEVEL DESIGN & TEST

Reference persons PAOLO ERNESTO PRINETTO

External reference persons Pascal TROTTA (PhD student), Giuseppe AIRO´ FARULLA (PhD Student), Tiziana MARGARIA (Lero, Limerick, Ireland)

Research Groups TESTGROUP - TESTGROUP

Thesis type EXPERIMENTAL

Description Motivations:

Nowadays, many services and applications need to be secured in order to guarantee the users’ privacy as well as the commercial and legal issues related to security threats and to safeguard the business stakeholders. While several standards, protocols and algorithms exist for handling the basic primitives for security (i.e., confidentiality, authentication, privacy), their implementation in real objects may require very high expertise and efforts.
The development of the Advanced Open-source Security Platform SEcube™ (Secure Environment Cube) tries to fill this gap providing heterogeneous security-oriented hardware, coupled with an open-source modular software architecture In the Platform, all the functional blocks are isolated and well documented in order to deliver to developers an easy-way to build, understand, modify, and rewrite the whole system if wanted.
The SEcube™ hardware consists of a single System-on-Chip (SoC) composed of three main blocks: (i) a low-power ARM Cortex-M4 processor, (ii) a flexible and fast Field-Programmable-Gate-Array (FPGA), and (iii) an EAL5+ certified embedded SmartCard.
All these features make the SEcube™ platform perfectly suitable for a wide range of applications. As example, it can be employed to safely enable Internet of Things (IoT) in highly technological industrial environments (Industry 4.0), where security represents a major concern.

Goal of the thesis:

• Selection and setup of a reference IoT use case (e.g., secure remote access to an industrial machine equipped with a microcontroller and connected to the network).
• Software stack and requirements definition based on SEcube™ hardware architecture.
• Implementation and demonstration of the considered test case.

Learning outcomes:

The student will acquire the abilities to develop and deploy next-generation distributed systems, with particular emphasis on security aspects and associated software requirements.

External/Industrial cooperations:

The thesis will be carried out in collaboration with:
• Blu5 View Pte. Ltd. (Singapore)
• CINI CyberSecurity National Lab, Nodo di Torino (Torino, Italy)
• Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre (Limerick, Ireland)
• LIRMM (Montpellier, France).